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How the New Location Targeting Options in Facebook Ads Will Improve your Relevancy

Facebook has long been the go-to social media platform for advertisers for many different reasons, the main one being the ultra-granular targeting options available. Facebook has now added a new layer of targeting for advertisers to utilize, and it has the potential to dramatically increase relevance.

Currently location targeting allows advertisers to select their target audience based on country, province, city, postal code or even a specific business address. With the added benefit of adding radius targeting around the above selections and also adding excluded locations.

Now Facebook has added an additional layer of detail when it comes to location targeting by adding multiple options to refine the targeting to users within this selection who would be the most interested in your content.

The choices for audiences within a location are:

Everyone in this location: Users whose current location on their Facebook profile is the selected location, as well as anyone determined to be in that location through their mobile devices.

People who live in this location: Users whose current location on their Facebook profile is that location. This is also validated by IP address.

Recently in this location: Users whose most recent location is in the selected area, as determined through the users’ mobile device. This also includes users who live there or who may be traveling there.

People traveling in this location: Users whose most recent location is within the selected area, and are greater than 100 miles from their stated home location in their Facebook profiles.

To maximize reach and improve performance the best use of these options are to use:

Everyone in this location for awareness campaigns.

People who live in this location for action/conversion driven campaigns.

Recently in this location to maximize reach for short lived action/conversion driven campaigns.

People traveling in this location for all services related to travelling. (hotel/car rental/tourist events/restaurants)

For example, a retail company looking to promote a huge two-day sale would ideally select their location (city/postal code) and then select “people recently in this location” to maximize reach and engagement from users who have been recently in that location.

Another example of how to best to use these new options would be for a hotel chain that would like to maximize last minute bookings at a particular location. They would select the appropriate city/postal code and then select “people travelling in this location” to reach travelling users and increase relevancy and therefore engagement/conversions rates.

This new option will be slowly rolling out into each account in the coming months, and as is the case with all of Facebook’s different targeting options, there are multiple ways that these new options can be used. This is clearly another big improvement from Facebook and this will very likely increase the relevance and therefore engagement rates of any new campaigns.